a brighter tomorrow?

A bright and happy Asian-American family is looking into the sunshine of a brighter tomorrow through organic consumerism… wow! Brought to you by Chank Diesel.

Artisanal Parenting

or intuition proofing your life: it has come to my attention that many super privileged parents have devoted themselves to "artisanal parenting." Previously on the blog, I have complained about a system of "infant education" very fashionable among the well capitalized, anxious new parent set. Involved with this form of parenting is asking a preverbal infant if it is all right "if I pick you up." While it seems that these parents believe in infant choice or individual self-possession from the moment of birth, or least trust fund inception, they are actually transmitting the deepest form of anxiety possible - in the face of infant anxiety. I just heard Dr. James Grotstein speak yesterday: I wonder what this eminent Kleinian would say about this grown up fantasy about infant choice.

His thesis has to do with infantile anxiety as a condition of the transferential relationship - and talks about the immobilization of the infant in the crib as vital to understanding the analytical relationship. To pretend to give an infant a choice about being picked up when she/he is negotiating with paranoid/schizoid levels of anxiety seems a perverse at best, but is based upon a fantasy of the "perfect parent" whose respect for the child is infinite and infinitely oppressive. Compare this with the eminently pragmatic, but theoretically rigorous notion of the "good enough mother." Basically, what these rich, white parents are saying is, "the good enough mother is NOT good enough for junior" who will go on to assert his infantile needs as a form of "self-esteem" in a terrifying and perhaps even repellent manner.

favorite whines

have been on our mind recently...friends from New York have imported this joke...I do a lot of whine control in my everyday life and don't really have time to whine anymore although I used to, but all of this made me think about how a lot of the feminist/personal empowerment movement is about mobilizing the favorite whine into activism. Like, instead of saying, "he never takes me seriously..." whine, whine, whine, it suddenly became, "HE DOESN'T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY and this is a political issue." The problem with this political transformation of the whine is that it still assumes, a priori, that one deserves to be taken seriously as a matter of entitlement, rather than that being taken seriously must be earned. Now lest you all think that I have gone entirely the way of the stiff upper lip, think about the impossibility of the revolutionary whine!

By the way, we watched The Departed last night and what a mess of a movie. Heavy Handed, Excessive, Messy and Out of Control are understatements, but it opened in a promising manner, hearkening back to the anti-busing racism of Boston's 1960s with incredible soundtrack and documentary footage -- I thought it was going to be one of these incredible meditiations on class conflict, racism and violence, and then it turns into an inditement of one man, a "rat." No more black figures make it onscreen after we see a wee little lassie's face framed in a school bus while angry Irish Americans pelt her with eggs and insults. Scorcese has lost it...but best of all was his imaginary "professional woman" as police psychiatrist.

I think he needs to get out more.

private truth and reconciliation committees

Can there be such a thing? Isn't all truth and reconciliation in some sense collective? What happens however to the category of the family in all this? The communalism of Mao and Stalin could not break the back of the bourgeois family and its unitary powers of reproduction...but I think that if there is no psychic ground for family justice, there can be no ground for its public instantiation either.